Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

Fellow Blogger Veyron recently mused about friends list etiquette in SL. Recently a long time friend of mine disappeared from my friends list. Granted she said she dropped a few weeks ago, but I had been rather busy the last few months and so had she. She in fact had taken a hiatus from SL for several months too. Logging in long enough to do her business and log out. At some point she arbitrarily decided that a large portion of her friends list was a waste of space to her so she struck many a name from it to include mine and my partner Izabella. When I discovered her name missing from my list I confronted her. She was rather matter of fact if not flip about her reasons. We hadn’t talked in a couple of months, so I wasn’t worthy of her friends list. Ok, in normal circumstances I could understand her rationale, but she actually did mean something to me. I was not some casual contact she made one day. We had a long running history of interaction and looking out after each other. I truly believed her to be a close dear friend and that I mattered to her.

You see, we met 13 months ago by chance at Ahern. I took her sailing at Hollywood and it set of a whole series of events and introduced me to so many great people. I also returned the favor and introduced her to people I knew. When she had her traumatic break up with her first SL hubby, me and Izabella were there for her, to hold her hand and comfort her. It really mattered to us that she recovered and felt better. We loved that gal! She claimed that me and Iza were among her 4 most closest friends ever in SL. I believed her, I truly did. I felt the same way about her. I always felt that she had my back and that I had hers. If she ever needed help I’d come running and vice versa. Although we no longer hung out in the same sims all the time we knew what each was up to. Heck we were even invited as guest to her next wedding (she and the new hubby are doing fine still).

So it was quite the shock when I noticed her missing. I asked her what I did and she said nothing, other than us not chatting recently. To me it was a kick in the teeth. It was as if I had been told I was a ZERO, a nobody, someone not even worthy of a slot on her friends list. Right, I got the line about the friggin’ notecard, but seriously, few people use that option. You exchange notecards when you DON’T want to be friends.

So there you go. My unfortunate tale about friends and the friends list. If you are going to remove someone, then you better have a good reason and you should think it through. You may not realize what you mean to that person and vice versa. You could end up burning someone who really was a good friend of your yours.

So I say good riddance to her. If she can throw away 13 months of friendship on a whim, I guess she does not appreciate anything that his been done for her. Nor does she appreciate what she have done for me. Had we not met on 26 June 2006 in Ahern, our past year would have been so radically different.